Mapserver on Linux vs Windows

[Ed McNierney]

Tim -

"neither windows or linux were optimised" 

But doesn't that largely invalidate the test?  It's very easy to set up poorly-tuned versions of Windows or Linux.  If you simply install both systems out-of-the-box, you're comparing apples and oranges.  This is especially true if you're comparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Windows XP Pro, a desktop operating system!  XP Pro is most certainly not tuned out-of-the-box to be a server platform.

If you have actual test data it would be helpful to publish it so others can try to reproduce it.  But I will continue to insist that there is FAR more performance variation in other aspects of the system than in the simple choice of which operating system is used.

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
Phone: +1 (978) 251-4242
Fax: +1 (978) 251-1396
ed at topozone.com

-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of tim
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 10:08 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Mapserver on Linux vs Windows

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 22:39 +0100, Sture Dingsøyr wrote:
> Hi there
> 
> We have a server running Mapserver on Linux (Red Hat 8). Is is used to generate maps, mainly from shapefiles. But also some layers from Postgis/WMS. To do this we use PHP and MapScrip...
> 
> We are now considering the possibility to port our solution from Linux to Windows, mainly du to the fact that maintaining new versions of Mapserver on Windows are quite easy with the pre-built binary package that exists for Windows (no compiling is needed).
> 
> Does anybody have any experience on how a Mapserver solution works on Windows compared to Linux. I am mainly thinking about speed and performance? 
> 
> Does Mapserver work faster on Linux? 
> 
> Regards Sture

We have been testing mapserver on both linux (rhel 3.x) and windows (xp
pro) for performance testing.  I can't remember the exact results (someone else on our team did the actual testing) but on high end hardware (Dell dual xeon 3ghz 4gb ram) ms on linux approached 50% higher load than on windows.  I'll have to check next week just how the test were done but the decision was clearly in favour of linux.  I do know that neither windows or linux were optimised and the feeling was we could extend the linux performance considerably (by doing things like not running X etc).

HTH,
Tim Bowden
--
Mapforge Geospatial
Level 3/ 267 St Georges Tce
Perth 6000
Western Australia